


Neville Longbottom and the Lesser-Known Mercury Fly Trap

by AlterEgon



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Trick or Treat 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-22
Updated: 2015-10-22
Packaged: 2018-04-27 14:30:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5052142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlterEgon/pseuds/AlterEgon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An unlikely pair finds each other in the weeks after Voldemort's defeat</p>
            </blockquote>





	Neville Longbottom and the Lesser-Known Mercury Fly Trap

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reserve](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reserve/gifts).



> Dear Reserve,  
> I hope that you will enjoy this little treat. It is not a pairing that I would have thought of to write without your prompt, and I hope that you will find my work adequate!
> 
> Many thanks go to my wonderful betas, Pameluke and Silverfox.  
> Further thanks go to Yuletide Chat for the gift of the Lesser-Known Mercury Fly Trap and its properties. You guys are awesome!

Looking back, even Neville wasn't always quite sure how it had happened.

In the aftermath of the war, things had changed so much. Confidence gained slowly over the years before had been boosted by the trials of their last year in school, and even more so by his active role in the final battle. Though the loss of friends was painful, he was almost glad that his own family had been destroyed in the last war, so many years ago, before he could properly remember.

As they set to rebuilding and mending the damage that had been done, he volunteered, along with many of his former class-mates. Cleaning up and restoring things, however, wasn't nearly as glorious a task as fighting had been. So while they had had many volunteers the first few days, their numbers dropped rapidly as time went by and people found more interesting things to do with their time and energy.

He'd been taking a break from working on the greenhouses, still far from being restored to the point where lessons could be held in them. He had walked aimlessly across the ground, glad to be able to move a bit after a morning of kneeling on the ground and tending to plants, trying to coax them into new growth. He could see others busy in the distance, hard at work trying to fix up the bridge in time for the new school year and the train that would hopefully cross it then. The projects that were more visible, involved less digging in the dirt and had a higher chance of newspaper coverage had more helpers left than they did at the greenhouses.

Saying that he was surprised to see the unmistakable light blond of Draco Malfoy's hair through the trees would have been an understatement.

Curious, he started towards that spot, half expecting that he had been mistaken.

Sure enough, though, there his former class-mate was, alone by the forest's edge, looking strangely forlorn.

It had been a hard time for the Malfoys, Neville knew. The once proud pureblood family had lost a lot, if not in money then in reputation. Shunned by their former circles, either for not participating in the battle, or for having hung on to the wrong side, depending on which way people leaned or which way they desired to appear, they were for the moment pushed to the fringes of wizarding society. While this was surely going to be a temporary situation – the Malfoys had always bounced back before, after all – it was not leaving them unaffected.

For a moment, Neville thought about just turning around and walking back, but a movement from among the greenery where Draco was sitting told him that he had already been spotted.

Strangely reluctant to add to the rejections so recently heaped on Draco, he stopped himself and instead took another few steps towards him.

"Hey," he said, more because it seemed stranger not to say anything at all. "What are you doing here?"

He regretted the words as soon as he heard himself say them. They almost sounded like an accusation.

"Nothing," Draco said. Even sitting on the forest floor, with a stray leaf in his hair, he looked impeccable in black and silver. His face seemed tired, though, and his voice sounded flat as he continued. "I just needed to get away from everyone for a bit."

That wasn't what Neville had expected. He wasn't sure what he had expected. Some snide remark, maybe, of the kind he had often heard from Draco during their time in school.

He needed to say something before the silence grew more awkward than he was already feeling. "How long have you been here?"

Draco shrugged. "A while. Malfoy Manor is not a good place to be right now."

Neville didn't ask him why or how. He wasn't sure he wanted to know. Before he could stop himself – before he had really thought about what he was doing – he held out the bag he'd been carrying on a strap over his shoulder. "Sandwich?"

There was surprise in Draco's eyes as they narrowed briefly.

It was Neville's turn to shrug. "The house elves must think we're all starving. I leave to take a break, and someone turns up and thrusts more food at me than I can possibly stomach. They'll be disappointed if I bring any back."

He wasn't sure how to take the brief headshake he got in response. Was he doubting the explanation, or wondering at so much consideration for house elf feelings? Whatever it was, it didn't keep him from reaching out and fishing one of the wrapped packets out.

'A while' must have been since before breakfast, Neville suspected when he saw how quickly the sandwich disappeared after a first few slow and polite bites.

"Don't they feed you at home?" Again, his words were out before he could think about them, though.

The corner of Draco's mouth twitched. "I skip meals," he admitted. "Sharing a table with my parents is not an enjoyable pastime these days."

Neville almost winced. He didn't know Draco's family, but he had heard enough of them to imagine that they could be exhausting at the best of times.

"Well, if you're bored here, you could come over and give us a hand and let the Hogwarts elves feed you." He gestured vaguely in the direction of the greenhouses.

"I'm not much good with plants."

"But you are with a wand." Was he seriously trying to talk Draco Malfoy into helping them with what he surely considered menial labour? His friends would declare him well on his way to losing his mind if they ever found out.

Slowly, Draco stood, brushing bits of forest floor from his robes in the process. Neville suddenly felt acutely aware of the earth and pieces of greenery still stuck to his own clothes. He was in trousers and a shirt, much more practical for the kind of work he had been doing than full robes.

"Don't know if they'll want me," Draco pointed out. His eyes were fixed on the ground, somewhere to Neville's right.

"Don't know about them," Neville said, pointing vaguely in the direction of the bridge. "But we'll take anyone willing to help." He could only hope that that was true.

They walked back silently, each of them busy with his own thoughts. Neville had to admit to himself that the closer they came to the greenhouses, and the moment when Professor Sprout and the other senior members of their team would see whom he was bringing along, the more this was seeming like an immensely bad idea. Still, he could hardly take back his suggestion now.

The Herbology professor was busily working on her plants when they arrived. Either she had worked through lunch without a break, or her break had been substantially shorter than Neville's.

"Professor?" he called out after making sure she wasn't doing anything that might end badly if she got distracted. "Mal—Draco has come to help us."

She looked up, surprise on her face. "Has he?"

"I have nothing else to do," Draco said, sounding as awkward as Neville felt. "I know I've never been good in your lessons, but if you have anything to do that wandwork is good for..." he trailed off, standing there not unlike a schoolboy caught in a prank and sent to detention.

Sprout raised her eyebrows at him, but relented so quickly then that Neville had to suspect she was actually glad to have another wand to help out. "You can help clear that field of debris." She indicated the direction with a jerk of her head. "Carefully, though. Some of it is buried pretty deeply, and it needs to be pulled out without damaging more – we may be able to salvage some of the plants if enough of their roots are left."

"Understood." Draco snapped his wand into his hand from where he wore it strapped to his forearm and turned to stride off towards his workplace, a little of the Malfoy arrogance back in his posture the moment he knew he wasn't being turned away.

"And Draco?" Sprout called after him.

He stopped to look back over his shoulder at her.

"Don't step on any plants that are still green."

*

Neville had not expected to see Draco again anytime soon. They hadn't talked again that day – in fact, he hadn't even seen him anymore after he had returned to his own work. By the time he put away his tools for the night and retreated into the room he had been given in the castle while he was working here, Malfoy had been gone.

Without saying goodbye, as well.

He shook his head and told himself that he was not feeling disappointed by that. There really was no reason to.

There was, however, every reason to be surprised when a shadow fell across the earth in front of him just a few minutes after he had set to work the next day, and he glanced up to look into Draco Malfoy's pale face.

"Oh," he said, brushing a strand of hair from his face and leaving the first earth smear of the day there. "Morning."

"Morning." Draco regarded him with a slightly sheepish smile. "I didn't finish yesterday." He glanced towards the field he had been sent to the last day.

Then why'd you leave early? Neville almost blurted out. He checked himself just in time, though. "Glad you came back," he said instead. "We can use the help."

There was an awkward pause while they merely looked at each other. Something about Draco was odd that morning, and it wasn't that he wasn't being his usual full-of-himself Slytherin self. It took a moment to register. "What are you wearing?"

Draco's face darkened a little as he glanced down at his things. They were trousers and a shirt, slightly faded and entirely out of fashion. "Best I could find," he said. "In the attic. We don't have those blue trousers everyone wears for work. Robes were getting in the way too much yesterday. Think it'll do?"

"It'll do just fine," Neville said with what he hoped was an encouraging smile. "Now, why don't we both get started?"

*

Draco returned to their team the next day, and the day after, though he had cleared the field assigned to him by then.

They spent their lunch break together more often than not. When they didn't, Neville found that he missed it.

There wasn't a lot of talk, at first. They didn't really have much to say to each other. As they continued in their chores, though, their work offered material to start conversation, and once started, Neville found himself sharing things he would never have expected to ever disclose to a Slytherin – let alone Draco Malfoy.

It was just before one of those lunch breaks that Draco found Neville bent over a plant, sadly shaking his head.

"What is it?" Draco asked and came a step closer for a better look.

Neville moved aside a little to let Draco see the plant he had been tending. It was wilted, very clearly dying. It looked vaguely familiar to Draco, but he couldn't quite remember what it was called. He'd never paid that much attention in Herbology. It had no roots, though, and it didn't seem damaged on that end, so that was probably the way it was supposed to be. How it fed, he wasn't sure.

"The lesser-known Mercury flytrap," Neville supplied when he realised that Draco was at a loss. "It escaped when the greenhouse shattered. Maybe it got damaged by a spell flying around out there – or it ate something it shouldn't have. I don't think the school will be able to replace this one."

That got Draco's attention.

"That's a Mercury flytrap?" he asked.

"That was a Mercury flytrap," Neville said. "It should be a bright blue, not this sickly greenish hue… They bounce around to trap insects that they live on. It should have been kept in a tank to keep it safe, but the tank broke… They are used for—"

"Making snitches." The Mercury flytrap may have been less well known than its cousin, the Venus flytrap, but every Quidditch enthusiast knew about it! Admittedly, though, Draco had never bothered to look up the actual plant, and he hadn't even been aware that the school owned one.

Neville nodded. "They're actually quite sensitive, so they only get handled by the older students. Or, well, it, as the school hasn't been able to keep more than one at a time in a long time. And this one…"

He watched sadly as the plant's leaves twitched in one last attempt to bounce, then dropped and lay still.

"That's it," Neville said. "Maybe someday we can get another one, but the snitch makers tend to be very protective of their stocks, and they're about extinct in the wild…"

*

It was late that night when someone knocked at Neville's door. Already in pyjamas and a bath robe, he opened the door, finding himself face to face with Malfoy. Strange, he mused even as he finished the thought, how he defaulted back to 'Malfoy' now that the he was back to wearing impeccable black and silver robes instead of working clothes that could be dirtied or torn.

He looked strangely nervous, though.

Realising that neither of them had said anything, Neville felt the need to fill the silence. "Did you forget anything earlier?"

It was a stupid question to ask, of course. If he had, he would have gone right to the greenhouses instead of coming in to seek him out in his room in the castle.

"No." Draco cleared his throat. "I brought you something – can I come in?"

Blushing at his own rudeness, Neville stepped aside. "Sure." He watched Draco enter, and look around. "It's not much." He shouldn't feel the need to apologise for his accommodation, he thought, but he did. "I'm just staying here until most of the work is done."

After the battle, the castle had been in no condition to take up lessons again. While Neville might have preferred to stay in his usual room in the Gryffindor dorms while he was helping, that sadly was not going to be an option for quite a while. A primary target for an army of which a considerable percentage had been recruited from Slytherin, Gryffindor tower was, quite simply, not very much inhabitable at the moment. Given the choice of commuting from his grandmother's home or taking one of the rooms that had been hurriedly assigned for volunteers, Neville had chosen this as by far the more practical option.

Draco gave a dry laugh. "It sure is more comfortable than Malfoy Manor these days. Speaking of which – I brought you something."

"So you said…" Neville's eyes rested on the pouch Draco was carrying.

The pouch was quite obviously larger on the inside than on the outside. Draco needed both hands to get the container that he had stowed in it out. It looked like a box, wrapped in a blanket.

 

"I wasn't sure how to transport it without getting it all upset," Draco said with an apologetic shrug. "It kept bouncing into the glass." He carefully put his burden down on the empty table and folded back the cover. "You can plant it tomorrow — do you even say plant if it has no roots?"

Neville stared. There, in a little glass enclosure, sat a brightly-blue and thoroughly annoyed mercury fly trap, opening and closing its leaves as the light from the overhead lamp woke it up.

He threw the blanket back over it before it could start bouncing and possibly break a stem on the sides of its container. "This is—" He was at a loss for words. "Where did you get it?"

"Father's had it in his office forever," Draco said. "I think he got it for some donation or another around the time I started getting into Quidditch."

The potential implications made Neville go pale. "You didn't steal this from your father, did you?"

Draco shook his head emphatically. "He used to really like it because it's rare and expensive and all, but since – you know, since Azkaban, he hasn't been taking the bouncing and tapping so well anymore. I just said I could take it away if he was disturbed by it and he nodded, so I grabbed it and got out of there."

"I can't pay for this," Neville said. Maybe the school would, but he doubted it. Not with all the rebuilding they still had to do.

"It's already yours."

Suddenly, Draco was standing very close before him, looking up at him with an expression that Neville found impossible to place for a moment, and then unbelievable once he had placed it. He had a moment to pull back, but instead stayed where he was, closing his eyes and then meeting Draco halfway.

They parted again, breathless. Neville scrambled to collect his thoughts. He needed to do something – if he didn't, he knew exactly what he wanted to do next, and he knew just as well that he felt nothing like ready to go there.

"You do," he said, grasping at something that had been said earlier. "Plant it, I mean. And I should. It doesn't have enough space in there – that's why it keeps bouncing into the walls. It needs more room. And also food. What did your father feed it?"

Draco needed a moment to catch on to the sudden rush of words. "I don't know," he admitted then. "I guess the house elves did when they watered the plants… I expect they water the plants anyway." It was not something he had ever given any thought to.

"Well." Neville lifted the container carefully. "It should go into the greenhouse now. Do you—do you want to come?"

"Do you want to get dressed first?"

Neville blushed anew, but shrugged it off. "No one's going to be around anyway, so why bother?" Besides, to put on proper clothes, he would have to get undressed first, and the idea of getting naked, right now, with Draco just in the next room, after the way their encounter only moments ago had felt, was not something he wanted to contemplate.

They hurried to the greenhouses, an unlikely couple – one dressed impeccably in fine robes, the other barefoot in a dressing gown.

By the light of Draco's wand, Neville prepared the bed in which he wanted to install the fly trap, applying all the care a precious plant deserved. The work was calming, as always when he was in the greenhouses.

It didn't take long before they could lift the plant from its tank and let it rest in a bed of moist earth. Even without roots, it would be able to take up fluid from the soil.

"There," Neville said, standing and taking out his wand to complete the spell that would keep the fly trap from bouncing all over the greenhouse at the first rays of sunlight, and the flies he was about to release near it from flying out of reach. "It'll be happier here than in that tank in any case."

He felt Draco close behind him and turned slowly. The earlier near-panic of things moving too quickly was gone now, soothed away by the familiar steps of planting and being surrounded by the growing life in his care. Something that Draco had said earlier came back to him. Malfoy Manor was not a comfortable place to be at right now. He wondered if it ever was, even if you weren't a Mercury Fly Trap.

"It's late – do you want to stay the night? You know… no need to risk waking up the house when you get back?"

Draco's nod came without hesitation, the smile spreading on his face suggesting that his parents' undisturbed rest was not the topmost thing on his mind.

Neville would have been lying if he'd claimed he minded.


End file.
